The Several Styles 1 1 1 



This is essential to preserve the tone of art, to give the walk 

 an object or design, and to justify any divergence from it into 

 another walk. The ruling and blighting defect of gardens in 

 which straight walks occur is that the ends of the walks are 

 often left quite open and unfurnished. When they merely 

 surround the house, or exist only on one or more of its sides, 

 such accompaniments are not of so much consequence, and 

 may sometimes be omitted with advantage as well as pro- 

 priety. Still, a terrace walk in the front of a house ought 

 always to have some stone or other seat, or covered arbor 

 or similar architectural finish at its blank end, if it has one. 

 Vases, statues, seats, alcoves, temples, urns, sundials, or 

 mere ornamental pedestals, or any architectural form that 

 has some Httle elevation above the surface, will give a suffi- 

 cient termination to the end of a walk. Of the plants suited 

 for the same purpose, rhododendrons are perhaps the best. 

 Other plants which will answer are arbor vitses and retinis- 

 poras. Of larger kinds, the hemlock blue spruce or the 

 Douglas spruce will be appropriate. All upright and slender 

 forms are ill adapted to the object, being too narrow and 

 spiry. 



Masses of trees or shrubs should never come up to the end 

 of a walk (fig. 27a), where there is room for a single specimen. 

 They may now and then be very useful behind a single plant 

 or an architectural figure. But the sorts immediately behind 

 a specimen should be deciduous, if it is evergreen, and con- 

 trast with it both in color and form, to give it more promi- 

 nence and relief; while those at the back of a stone-colored 

 ornament ought to be evergreens of the darkest hue, for a 

 similar reason. 



This must be understood, however, as far from meaning 

 that a plantation at the end of a straight walk, even behind 

 another object, is necessarily a good thing. An open space 



